Every time I go to meet my fellow curmudgeons at the Pick-Your-Nose Cafe I get a juicy story to laugh over, human behaviour being so pathetically absurd these third millenium days. Ayesha, the infamous drag queen, came swishing in with a macrome shawl over her head as if she were a Chinese madonna, hissing at the latest schitzo wreck mumbling to himself at an outside table, she hated to be so downfallen that she had to be seen near such human detritus. I was bitching about a doco I'd seen last week on TV, "The Protocols of the Order of Sion", badmouthing Jews for all of history's disasters. The Grand Master of Curmudgeonville, Vitto, proprietor of the Shoe-box Psycho-drama Theatre, has a huge photo of Mel Gibson on the wall, declaring his undying love for the Catholic mega-fascist, and I related how in the doco Mel and his rabid Catholic preacher of a father gave a nasty rant about "the horrid Jews who killed Christ", how ugly they were, how ignorant and vicious, all of which Vitto wouldn't listen to, even tho Mel would shoot him against the wall as an egregious poof if given the power.
Ayesha grandiloquently announced, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, that there was a night she could've had Mel but she'd knocked him back. Ayesha's claim to fame is that she was one of the original line-up of female impersonators wowing the confused, ribald gronks at Les Girls Night Club on the Cross, even touring the redneck red-desert outback with the troupe on which the film "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" is based. Umpteen years later she's aged and dotty, like many of us survivors of the 20th century gay wars, and still swoons about like a legend of the silver screen tho slowly devolving into entropic dissolution and mania, i.e. falling to bits in front of us, occasionally fainting out on the footpath and being heaved home, her drag finery torn and soiled. I sceptically asked her to tell me about Mel and with Asian eyes turned to the heavens, she related the night 25 years ago when she strode grandly down the staircase of the Bourbon and Beefsteak Hotel into the basement bar to espy a crowd of sycophants gathered around a guy in a Hawaiin hibiscus-print shirt.
She was so eye-sore marvelous in a strapless gold lame evening gown, gold high-heel shoes and hair swept into a tidal wave, the crowd couldn't help but take the focus off Mel and zero it onto her magnificence. Mel turned to discover what the distraction could be, and being drunk as a skunk, thought he was looking at a real live woman. He tried to chat her up with his loud American drawl, being a notorious fucker in those days, he screwed any pussy that meowed at him. She ignored him and flounced to the other end of the bar and Mel couldn't resist staggering thru the tables, knocking everyone over, to get to her and slur how he'd like to buy this gorgeous, golden gal a drink. She turned her nose up at him and announced, "Go away Mel, you're too drunk for me. I'm a lady, the real thing baby, not one of your one night hussies!" To which he dribbled disbelief and wandered off for the pussy posse to pounce on him like mosquitoes on a bleating bull-calf, to suck his blood and give him delirious Melaria, I imagine, from his subsequent Messiahnic delusions.
Ayesha looked at me with all seriousness, "Yes, I could've had him that night, he was mine for the taking." "Oh yeah, and you'd be proud to be just another arse-wipe for that ego-maniac I suppose, along with the hordes of other fame-whores?" Ayesha has the hide of an armadillo, she just threw her proud head in the air as if such comments were below her, she's had her 15 nano-seconds of fame and she was dining out on them ad infinitum. She was a wonderfully entertaining member of the Curmudgeon's Club and I laughed heartily at her grandiose sentiments, Drags are always good for a giggle, tho I wouldn't want to live with one, too much heart-breaking drama.
